It could be argued that the narrative and space of “citizen science” is being dominated by projects initiated from academic institutions, at least in terms of access to funding. Often these projects use the rhetoric of “democratisation of science” whilst the kind of public participation they offer amounts to little more than low-skilled crowdsourcing. In the meantime, bottom-up, community-led citizen science projects that may hold the potential to genuinely embed science in society struggle to survive.

CC-BY-SA Science Hack Day Berlin

How should we respond to this? How do we organise grassroots communities and collaborations with institutions to solve these problems?

We would like to discuss these issues and questions and collect opinions from the community ahead of this event.

Special Guest Lucy Patterson from Berlin :

Lucy is an independent community scientist co-organiser of an annual volunteer-run hackathon, Science Hack Day Berlin and the community that has grown up around it (twice-monthly meet ups), connecting scientists, artists, designers, developers, and enthusiasts for collaborative projects. She will attend to the DITOs project forum on Saturday March 25th invited as one of the DIY representatives.